How I joined Aoi Shoujo Scan

This story's a bit of a doozy, but I figure it's interesting enough to warrant telling! So here goes.

I first became part of the ILTV community back in Summer 2024. I joined the fancord to mention that I was working on a scanlation of the Blu-ray bonus chapter. (currently 25.6, but it's been 25.5 in the past.) In an effort to not damage my booklet, the "scans" were made by taking photos in a special way. The result was subpar, but tolerable: (vs the current version.)

So with this version, I brought up the project in the server. However, as it turned out they had an implicit rule against posting this content, and I had to take it down. But I was also contacted by Quorniya, who directed me to a wordpress version of the release featuring decent scans and a script I could typeset. So I jumped ship to that, ditching my version. Unfortunately, the script needed work and the scans were only barely good enough to work into a scanlation. But in the end it was way better than what I was going to post.

With this content now posted to MangaDex, it no longer made sense to restrict the content on the fancord, and as such that rule no longer exists.

Fast forward a bit. I'd become a regular on the ILTV fancord, and I'd made some friends. Namely the owner of the Extra Emotes servers, Ultimate Homura... and the lead fan-scanlator of the manga at the time, Mistine. Now I'd been oblivious back then, but Mistine had taken a liking to me and had started to casually flirt. Fortunately though, Homura's outside perspective came to the rescue! As it turns out, she was aware of some unfortunate goings-on with Mistine. I won't get into the details, because I already sorta did elsewhere, but suffice it to say it would've gone poorly for me if I'd been receptive to that flirting. (If you've read the afterword about it, the flirting started almost immediately after all of that went down.)

Having learned of the past events, I made a handful of moves to try to prevent such things from happening again. The goal was to, if not remove Mistine from the fancord, then at least torch her reputation to make it harder for her to charm future victims. ✨ Didn't work ✨! Though that story DOES have a happy ending- Mistine was banned from the fancord thanks to an unreasonably extensive report that Homura and I put together.

While those shenanigans were going on, I got to thinking. If Mistine got ousted, she may quit the scanlation. In which case I'd be indirectly responsible for the loss of the fan TL. I didn't want to do that to the community.

Enter Aoi Shoujo scan.

The team had been slipping for a while now. The delay between the JP releases and their EN releases had skyrocketed to over 100 days by this time, and it was evident that the team was practically dead. And why not? Mistine had overtaken them, and her team was pumping out pretty damn good scanlations too, so long as you didn't mind AI cleans. From their perspective, well, what was the point of Aoi Shoujo Scan?

By now you've probably worked out that I decided to either join Aoi Shoujo Scan and help them catch up, or get a fresh start by bringing on a translator to help with making ILTV scanlations under my own team's name. And yeah, I was considering that- I even made an afterword template. Fortunately I didn't have to do that. Aoi Shoujo brought me on to do cleans, and I sort of just kept to that for the next few months.

I suppose the story is over now. But there's more to this- after all, the team didn't make its comeback until just a few months ago.

Unfortunately, in the background, our team had just fractured. QnD quietly left, meaning that we no longer had a main translator- and our backup didn't have a way to access the raws, so we didn't have scripts for our typesetter. Since nobody really jumped at the chance to fix it, we got nothing out after chapter 44. (Sorry to see you go, QnD.)

It's all because of that report we made. Once the fancord staff had been refreshed on the situation, they got to reconsidering Mistine's position on the server. It was clear: she had to go. But she didn't...at least, not at first. Due to concerns about backlash, the team agreed to hold off on the ban until they were ready.

So for the next few months, we just sat on the agreement to ban Mistine. I mentioned it to Sha-tan, leader of Aoi Shoujo scan, noting that we may lose the main TL and should resume our own TLs just in case. We agreed to bring it up with the team, and the result was: We were back. I'd be doing typesets and provide raws to the translator, Kumi and I would continue to team up on cleans, and our backup translator would write the translation.

With the plan established, we got to work on chapter 52 as soon as it dropped, and...did not get it out for a month. Unfortunately our translator had some stuff going on at the time and couldn't get much done until a bit before 55 released. But with the posting of chapter 52, that was that. We'd made our comeback. And then we went on to do a day-of scanlation of chapter 55, reclaiming the lead from Mistine and setting a new record for ourselves.

Oh yeah, and during work on 52 I had the idea to redesign the afterword template. The team loved it of course! After all, it's the design we use today! The results even led me to redesign the My Future Translations afterword template as well, which turned out similarly excellent. I'm very proud of both.